Dollhouse and the question of (episodic/serial) identity

Dollhouse is a show that will be written about more than it was watched. As a text, it’s challenging, ambitious, flawed, prescient, interrogative, philosophical, troubling, exploitative, reflective, reflexive, and a hell of a ride. From a production standpoint, it’s an interesting object of study regarding who has power over a program, the tug-of-war between “network” and “auteur,” and the limits of the latter’s plan(s) in the frame of the former’s goals. With regards to reception, Dollhouse asked a great deal of its audience (in part due to the production imbalance): Joss Whedon, the show-runner, sent a missive to the press admitting the weakness of the first five episodes but promising a better show with episode six, implicitly requiring six weeks of patience from his audience; the most important episode of the series, “Epitaph One,” was never aired on television and could only be found on iTunes of the season one DVD set, forcing the audience to seek the episode out via alternative means; and perhaps most importantly to my thesis here, by the end of the series, the audience is rewarded for that patience and that multimedia savvy in not only the narrative but also the form, an aspect of television not often examined.

The shift from episode five to episode six of the first season is a shift from episodic television to serial television, and with that, a widening worldview within the series. The first five episodes consist of closed narratives: Echo (Eliza Dushku), a human doll, can be programmed to be anyone and do anything, but her brain gets the tabula rasa treatment at the end of each engagement, returning her to her placid, anonymous doll state. Each episode returns to the status quo for Echo and the Dollhouse, and that is the reach of the world. Episode six, “Man on the Street”, however, begins with the dilation of this world. Textually, the episode opens with interviews of supposedly random Los Angelinos about the Dollhouse, positioning the Dollhouse as an urban legend, a story existing out in the world, not just confined to the Dollhouse as an actual location. (Admittedly, the “rumor” of the Dollhouse was part of the B-plot of these early episodes in which FBI agent Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) investigates the Dollhouse as his white whale, but his investigation is so tied with Dushku’s character that it doesn’t seem larger than the A-stories.) Instead, it’s a locus of rumors, fears, and meanings created by those who are aware of it, not unlike the show’s relationship with its viewers. The form of these interviews further supports this meta-relationship; shot in verite style, with hand-held camera and degraded quality, they look strikingly like real-world evening news “man on the street” interviews. This world may not be our world, but it could be. Our eyes have been opened to both our world and the wider one within the program, undermining the supposed containment of the first five episodes.

"realism" complete with real-world news host

Moreover, this supposed containment within the text of the early episodes extends to the form, for the world’s containment reflects the formal containment in the episodic narratives. The wider world behind the Dollhouse has always been there, but the veil was solid in the early episodes. However, as the series progressed, especially regarding the big reveals in the later season two episodes, the early episodes become important because of the seriality of the later episodes.

We’re supposed to be frustrated by those first episodes, feel the tedium and exhaustion of not having a stable character with whom to identify, of always returning to an empty status quo. We are thus able to identify–at least empathetically–with the dolls who lack any such stability. Like those who tuned into Dollhouse expecting the serial (or at least the complex narrative) we’ve come to expect from a Joss Whedon show and were instead stymied by episodic–and kind of boring–stories, the dolls’ identities, compendiums of memories and serial stories of existing, are put on hold. When Echo starts to actualize as a gestalt person instead of an empty vessel, holding onto her past experiences, those of us who endured the frustration can grab onto that evolution in the same way her incipient identity does. This is perhaps the most difficult process Whedon and his team require of the audience, but the linkage of the form, the character, the story, and the audience is extremely sophisticated and rewarding.

another "Man on the Street" reward

I can’t say the show was perfect, or even overall a great series, but it was one of the most ambitious shows I’ve seen. And when those ambitions were fulfilled and realized, it was astounding, pushing the form, narrative, and audience into uniquely interrelated analytical space.

5 responses to “Dollhouse and the question of (episodic/serial) identity”

I think I get what you mean, but I’m confused about what you call stability in the doll character–do you mean consistent patterns of identity performance? Is that what was lacking in the first episodes? I want to see it. Once it bacame a series, was it fairly conventional with an ongoing plot or threads?

The premise of the show is that the dolls have NO identity other than when they are programed for engagements. They wander around the Dollhouse with blank stares and non-existent wills, herded like animals (and are in fact described as “free range” in the second season). The stability I’m referring to is regarding traditional characterization. In those first episodes, there is nothing beyond physical traits to distinguish between dolls; they all respond in the same way to the same stimulants by design. There is no room for development because they are ciphers for imprints instead of characters; thus, there is no “identity” for the audience to identify with regard to the dolls, with Dushku positioned as the main character.

What do you mean by series? Once it took the turn toward serial, each subsequent episode (barring perhaps one) somehow progressed the overarching narrative of the nefarious corporation that runs the Dollhouse(s) and of Echo’s evolution toward an identity (integration of her various imprints into a self). Some episodes may have been mostly episodic but included some element tying back to the serial narrative(s); that’s narrative complexity, the increasingly standard form of hour-long dramas.

I’d say yes, in that it destabilizes certain metanarratives of Western society, especially the idea of a unique individual subject, but things get a little murkier if your referring to a Frederic Jameson approach to postmoderism.